I think that I've rendered myself rantless these days what with stepping as far to the side as far as I can to avoid popular culture's tentacles while not becoming Unibomber-esque. I'm not living in a barricaded and isolated mountain shack...yet. Still, most of what consumes me with righteous indignation and ignites my perpetual sense of moral outrage can be traced to the vapidity of this stupid world we live in, and this stupid world we live in, in this country at least, is completely tangled up with popular culture: idiotic television programs that inform taste and trends; bombastic and hypocritical punditry; the same ol' political theatrics, presented to us as some sort of duality when it is so clear that what keeps it alive is our buying into this alleged duality; the sadness I feel with the state of feminism and the unwillingness of environmentally- and socially-aware people to acknowledge the legitimacy of adopting a vegan lifestyle. All these things agitate me, like a washer out of its cycle, thrashing and shaking. What I used to do is throw myself into the ring, and, to use a violent metaphor, slug my way (verbally) at my opponents, fists perpetually balled up. These days, I don't know if I have become more peaceful or more passive, but the last thing I want to do is engage with those who are hellbent against progress.
The principle behind homeopathy is that like treats like. Perhaps, in life, like seeks like as well. We usually think of harmony as disparate elements in balance, the yin and the yang fitting together like a perfect squeeze, but maybe it is more subtle than that, more of a delicate fine-tuning to find your inner-harmony. When I think about my close friends, yes, we might have some basic differences, but they are not insurmountable: our core values mesh well. I am trying to live a meaningful, rich life and so those who I seek out and those who seek me out tend to be doing the same thing. Of course I don't attract anti-immigration Limbaugh-listening hunters into my life and I wouldn't even if I lived in that territory: we are not in resonance. You know that hoary old chestnut that if you dislike someone, it's because they remind you of some aspect of yourself that you don't like? Well, I do think that at times that's true, but sometimes you just don't like someone because he's an asshole whose values and behavior are totally foreign to you.
When I moved out of my childhood home and went to college, I discovered a broader but deeper meaning of family. The friends I made there became another family to me, a family of my choosing and discretion. Whereas family once meant to me something that I was locked into, an inevitability that I had little to do with, my family in college gave new meaning to the word, making it much more dynamic and personal. I didn't have to be constrained anymore by birthright, tied in with an alcoholic father because of our shared DNA: I could have sisters who were brilliant, creative, deeply compassionate because we were drawn together due to something almost as inevitable as DNA: our likenesses. Again, like seeks like.
I am always going to be an activist; I am always going to speak out. It's just that what I'm drawn to in my personal life is not argument and conflict. I'm too busy for that. Thus, I avoid the news, I avoid pop culture, and, in general, I try to trim the fat of life away as much as possible. I have found my life moving more and more in this direction over the years, leaner and more on target, less scattershot. What this means is that I have fewer things that I'm angry about, and, thus, fewer bloggable moments.
I hope that I can still make this work. I'm going to try.
Shalom, everyone.
Friday, August 15, 2008
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Our children are our teachers...
Today, I was walking through Humboldt Park when my son bent down to sniff some Queen Anne's Lace flowers. "They smell like tortillas," he remarked matter-of-factly. "Sweet tortillas." I laughed but then was compelled to sniff them myself. He was absolutely right: sweet tortillas.
I blame it on a dweeb named Chilton...
I have had chronic insomnia since about the age of 20, the first year I had an apartment without a roommate. It was a basement (a.k.a. garden, although there was no garden to speak of, only some gravel - hey! - maybe in retrospect it was a rock garden but I was too small-minded to see that) apartment in a rickety old dark red wooden house near campus. I had three tiny rooms - a bedroom, kitchen and bathroom - and I am convinced that I could hear the inner-workings of every pipe in that house. Sinks, showers, toilets: any time any of those were in use, I received an at times screeching, at times rumbling announcement. It was as if my apartment were in somebody's very hungry (or displeased) stomach. Needless to say, I figured out how to spend most of my time in painting studio, coffee shops or bars.
I couldn't sleep in those places, though, and therein was the problem. There was another problem. His name was Chilton (Chilton!!) and he lived directly upstairs from me. He was a preppy, old money alcoholic from Kansas City and not long after he moved into the house, he started blasting - I mean blasting - his stereo at thirty second intervals starting at about two in the morning, and what made it worse was that he had awful taste in music. He'd be playing Styx, Foreigner. Anyway, that first night, after about a half hour of a bed rattling across the room and feeling like plaster was about to start falling from the ceiling, I went upstairs to confront him, which meant going outside in my robe because my apartment was along the side of the building. I pounded on his door for a good minute before he heard me. When he finally did, he opened his door with a wide smile, like, I don't know, he was expecting me to have brought him a 2:30 a.m. welcome-to-the-building cake or something, and I just said all staccato-like,"Turn. Off. Your. Horrible. Music. Now." He did, but being an entitled and privileged white boy, my angry demeanor tripped something in him that said, "Oh, she really doesn't like me. I must have her," and he commenced a month-long campaign to win me over that included flowers left at my door, notes slid under it, moon-y glances whenever I'd run into him while checking my mail. He was really, really annoying. Once it was clear that his overtures were not working - and that this wasn't just me being coy as I honestly, deeply disliked him - he began blasting his stupid stereo again and thus began my rocky relationship with sleep. I would call my landlord in the middle of the night and hold my phone out toward the ceiling and she would call him which would result in about twenty minutes of passive-aggressive stomping by him and broomstick counterpoints by me, and by the point that ended, I'd be so wide awake that I couldn't go back to sleep. So I'd read or draw or write until it started to get light and then I'd drift off again for a couple of hours and start with my day.
I think I realized during this time that there were these hours during the middle of the night that could be better utilized. Plus, sleeping involved dreaming, and I had (still have) some doozies thanks to my frequently scary home environment as a child, not to mention the fact that dreams were Freud's domain and, as a feminist, I was duty-bound to consider the person who championed of concept of "penis-envy" with derision. Thus, not sleeping could be interpreted as a feminist act of defiance. Take that, Freud! I would do without dreams and spend my REM hours catching up on assignments, building the case for a revolution through my creative output. It was like I had stumbled upon a secret - led there unintentionally by an annoying doofus - that there were all these extra hours of productivity no one else seemed to know about. (Of course, there were also many hours in the middle of the night when I was not sleeping when I was drinking and carousing with my friends: I wasn't always all that productive.)
These days, more often than not I am awake for at least a few hours in the middle of the night. Meditation, chamomile tea, self-hypnosis, caffeine- and sugar-avoidance do not really have much of an affect on whether I sleep or not. Except for a few short overlaps, one of us in the house seems to be always awake: John often stays up until midnight and I take over around 2:00 and stay up in 5:00 or so. Our son wakes up at 7:00. I guess you could call us vigilant. (Just last night I went downstairs to sit at the computer at 2:00 and I noticed that there was still cold water in the glass on the table next to me.) I don't know if it's because of a lust for life or a basic lack of discipline, but for me, the quote, "I'll sleep when I'm dead," feels very accurate.
Shalom, everyone.
I couldn't sleep in those places, though, and therein was the problem. There was another problem. His name was Chilton (Chilton!!) and he lived directly upstairs from me. He was a preppy, old money alcoholic from Kansas City and not long after he moved into the house, he started blasting - I mean blasting - his stereo at thirty second intervals starting at about two in the morning, and what made it worse was that he had awful taste in music. He'd be playing Styx, Foreigner. Anyway, that first night, after about a half hour of a bed rattling across the room and feeling like plaster was about to start falling from the ceiling, I went upstairs to confront him, which meant going outside in my robe because my apartment was along the side of the building. I pounded on his door for a good minute before he heard me. When he finally did, he opened his door with a wide smile, like, I don't know, he was expecting me to have brought him a 2:30 a.m. welcome-to-the-building cake or something, and I just said all staccato-like,"Turn. Off. Your. Horrible. Music. Now." He did, but being an entitled and privileged white boy, my angry demeanor tripped something in him that said, "Oh, she really doesn't like me. I must have her," and he commenced a month-long campaign to win me over that included flowers left at my door, notes slid under it, moon-y glances whenever I'd run into him while checking my mail. He was really, really annoying. Once it was clear that his overtures were not working - and that this wasn't just me being coy as I honestly, deeply disliked him - he began blasting his stupid stereo again and thus began my rocky relationship with sleep. I would call my landlord in the middle of the night and hold my phone out toward the ceiling and she would call him which would result in about twenty minutes of passive-aggressive stomping by him and broomstick counterpoints by me, and by the point that ended, I'd be so wide awake that I couldn't go back to sleep. So I'd read or draw or write until it started to get light and then I'd drift off again for a couple of hours and start with my day.
I think I realized during this time that there were these hours during the middle of the night that could be better utilized. Plus, sleeping involved dreaming, and I had (still have) some doozies thanks to my frequently scary home environment as a child, not to mention the fact that dreams were Freud's domain and, as a feminist, I was duty-bound to consider the person who championed of concept of "penis-envy" with derision. Thus, not sleeping could be interpreted as a feminist act of defiance. Take that, Freud! I would do without dreams and spend my REM hours catching up on assignments, building the case for a revolution through my creative output. It was like I had stumbled upon a secret - led there unintentionally by an annoying doofus - that there were all these extra hours of productivity no one else seemed to know about. (Of course, there were also many hours in the middle of the night when I was not sleeping when I was drinking and carousing with my friends: I wasn't always all that productive.)
These days, more often than not I am awake for at least a few hours in the middle of the night. Meditation, chamomile tea, self-hypnosis, caffeine- and sugar-avoidance do not really have much of an affect on whether I sleep or not. Except for a few short overlaps, one of us in the house seems to be always awake: John often stays up until midnight and I take over around 2:00 and stay up in 5:00 or so. Our son wakes up at 7:00. I guess you could call us vigilant. (Just last night I went downstairs to sit at the computer at 2:00 and I noticed that there was still cold water in the glass on the table next to me.) I don't know if it's because of a lust for life or a basic lack of discipline, but for me, the quote, "I'll sleep when I'm dead," feels very accurate.
Shalom, everyone.
Monday, August 11, 2008
In lieu of a summer vacation...
So it looks like fixing up the car, continuing to keep our home and the ability to purchase groceries is taking presidence over taking a summer vacation this year which I have to admit makes sense, even with my often-times impetuous attitude toward life. If we went away, it would surely be a nail-biter the whole time, and though I can be resourceful - I had to be when we ended up in San Francisco with far less money than we thought we had, and my son and I ended up getting by on approximately $7.00 a day for a week - I am really all right with the knowledge that if we do end up with time away from home, it'll probably be a weekend exploring the exotic wilds of Wisconsin. John and I are taking steps now to build more of a stable future, or at least a future with fewer threatening phone calls, and this feels right. As someone who has always jumped from whim to whim with the carefree nonchalance of a flowerchild, it feels a little scary to be so accepting of buckling down, but new behaviors are always challenging, right?
So it looks like Greece-Israel-Seattle-Vancouver-New Mexico will be another year. Given that, I think that a little walk down memory lane of all the horrible stuff that has happened to me while on vacation is in order.
* While downhill skiing somewhere in Massachusetts (I don't have any recollection where), I got my period and a forty-eight-hour hour flu at approximately the same time.
* An Amtrak to New York that was so delayed that my weekend in Manhattan ended up being about one full day.
* Standing in the extreme cold and rain of Washington, D.C., in November to protest George Bush's inauguration. While this was hardly a vacation - more like a spur-of-the-moment roadtrip with friends to scream at a processional of black-windowed limos presumably ushering Bush, Cheney and their cronies for about an hour - it was foreboding and appropriately chilling.
* Driving to Mount Rushmore with my family in the mid-1970s, with a father who was prone to road-raging and equally disinclined to pulling over for anything but the predetermined destination, no matter what the cause or how emphatically you pleaded it. We had the barf along the side of the car - thrown from a disposable cup at 70 mph - to prove it.
* The family wedding I went to with my parents in St. Louis, during the height of my feminist awakening in college. My father spotted my unshorn armpits at some juncture and he was apoplectic. He and I ended up having a screaming match in my room at the Marriott, a cathartic (for me) letting loose of nearly twenty years of mostly bottled-up rage at him, leaving me hoarse for days. While that was a distinctly unhappy trip, it was ultimately very therapeutic for me.
* Going to Chicago when my wallet was sitting in my desk drawer in Lawrence, Kansas.
* Driving down Route 66 in Oklahoma and Amarillo as a newly-minted vegan and trying to not develop a protein deficiency or scurvy.
* Listening to frantic message after message back at home in Chicago while we were visiting friends in Kansas, unable to piece together what had happened, only that it was something very bad and that I needed to call my mother as soon as possible. My father had suddenly died of a heart attack the day before New Year's Eve.
* The Evil Girl Squad who reigned supreme on our bus and tormented everyone who wasn't one of them on my seventh grade trip to Washington, DC. They stalked up and down the aisle, mean power gleaming in their eyes, looking for fresh victims while the rest of us, including the chaperones, slunk low in our seats, steadfastly avoided eye contact.
See? Traveling is not all it's cracked up to be. Vacations can mean sunburns or a disappointing amount of rain, forgetting your swimsuit, unfortunate reactions to the local drinking water, an unfavorable exchange rate, customs, a heightened likelihood that you will lose your wallet, locals giving you the evil eye for being less than fluent and arguments over who left the map back at the restaurant sixty miles away.
Oh, who am I kidding? As soon as I can responsibly divert a little cash from our car, house and debt, I am so out of here.
Shalom, everyone.
So it looks like Greece-Israel-Seattle-Vancouver-New Mexico will be another year. Given that, I think that a little walk down memory lane of all the horrible stuff that has happened to me while on vacation is in order.
* While downhill skiing somewhere in Massachusetts (I don't have any recollection where), I got my period and a forty-eight-hour hour flu at approximately the same time.
* An Amtrak to New York that was so delayed that my weekend in Manhattan ended up being about one full day.
* Standing in the extreme cold and rain of Washington, D.C., in November to protest George Bush's inauguration. While this was hardly a vacation - more like a spur-of-the-moment roadtrip with friends to scream at a processional of black-windowed limos presumably ushering Bush, Cheney and their cronies for about an hour - it was foreboding and appropriately chilling.
* Driving to Mount Rushmore with my family in the mid-1970s, with a father who was prone to road-raging and equally disinclined to pulling over for anything but the predetermined destination, no matter what the cause or how emphatically you pleaded it. We had the barf along the side of the car - thrown from a disposable cup at 70 mph - to prove it.
* The family wedding I went to with my parents in St. Louis, during the height of my feminist awakening in college. My father spotted my unshorn armpits at some juncture and he was apoplectic. He and I ended up having a screaming match in my room at the Marriott, a cathartic (for me) letting loose of nearly twenty years of mostly bottled-up rage at him, leaving me hoarse for days. While that was a distinctly unhappy trip, it was ultimately very therapeutic for me.
* Going to Chicago when my wallet was sitting in my desk drawer in Lawrence, Kansas.
* Driving down Route 66 in Oklahoma and Amarillo as a newly-minted vegan and trying to not develop a protein deficiency or scurvy.
* Listening to frantic message after message back at home in Chicago while we were visiting friends in Kansas, unable to piece together what had happened, only that it was something very bad and that I needed to call my mother as soon as possible. My father had suddenly died of a heart attack the day before New Year's Eve.
* The Evil Girl Squad who reigned supreme on our bus and tormented everyone who wasn't one of them on my seventh grade trip to Washington, DC. They stalked up and down the aisle, mean power gleaming in their eyes, looking for fresh victims while the rest of us, including the chaperones, slunk low in our seats, steadfastly avoided eye contact.
See? Traveling is not all it's cracked up to be. Vacations can mean sunburns or a disappointing amount of rain, forgetting your swimsuit, unfortunate reactions to the local drinking water, an unfavorable exchange rate, customs, a heightened likelihood that you will lose your wallet, locals giving you the evil eye for being less than fluent and arguments over who left the map back at the restaurant sixty miles away.
Oh, who am I kidding? As soon as I can responsibly divert a little cash from our car, house and debt, I am so out of here.
Shalom, everyone.
Sunday, August 10, 2008
Barbie-riffic birthday bonanza!
Last night we were driving home from a fairly late dinner with friends and their son when our car - which, poor thing, has so many problems, not the least of which is a failing transmission system we have been too broke to replace - started sounding even more pathetic than usual. We had just gotten on the expressway and we were about forty-five minutes from home, when it started to sound like there was a jet tailgating us, then it quickly became wobbly, and it's been many years since I slept through a Driver's Ed class, but still I know that you can't or at the very least shouldn't drive too long while wobbly, so we moved onto the shoulder of the road. John went out to inspect and you know that things are scary with your car when you're hoping for a flat tire versus some other, more sinister sight. Well, we got what was behind Curtain Number Two and that was a brake pad that had dissolved like a sugar cube with hot bits of sharp metal all around the back tire in its wake. Luckily, a helpful state trooper in a very reassuring trooper-y hat pulled over and called a tow truck for us, which apparently means that assistance has to arrive within thirty minutes as opposed to if we just called, which would have the sort of commanding effect of a meek, "Um, hey. Could, like, someone help me and my family out when you get a spare minute? Yeah, I'll just be hanging out." So, anyway, the state trooper called for us, a tow truck arrived about a half hour later, a really nice guy got our car all hooked up and he drove us all back home. We didn't get home and to sleep until after midnight.
I woke up like a shot this morning at 6:30 because my son had his cousin's birthday party in a distant suburb (the moral here, one that I already knew, is that the distant suburbs are Satan's Playgrounds, clearly) at the suitably ungodly hour of 10:30 and it's too painful to relive the chain of events that finally conspired to transport us there, but I will say that it involved an ill-fated, haphazard taxi ride part of the way to Union Station and another ride an hour later to said distant suburb that cost $90.00. Right after paying $175 for a tow. Oh and purchasing three tickets for a bombastic animatronic dinosaur show for another $175 because we were feeling flush at that brief moment before everything started collapsing around us. This damn show better help my son become the best paid paleontologist in the world, that's all I have to say. In the meantime, there are always lemonade stands and random, idle conversations about the Paleozoic era.
So, bringing us all back to the title, my sweet little niece turned four today so, almost inevitably, she has cotton candy-scented, bubble gum pink blood coursing in her veins and Cinderella on the brain. Disney has received a full access pass to this girl and her imagination, and it shows. She talks non-stop about princesses and castles, glitter sparkling and falling around her, like a pixilated little woodland nymph. Today, she received Barbie movies, Beauty and The Beast dress up stuff, Dora the Explorer pajamas, books featuring Cinderella. I think that our gift, a child's picnic basket and supplies, was the only non-pink, non-corporate-be-logo'ed item purchased for my niece this year. (Not that we're perfect by any stretch: this was the same gift we'd gotten her last year but mistakenly repurchased. Exchanging that will be another errand to remember.) During the gift opening, all I could do is all I usually do during the frenzy of shredded wrapping paper and discarded ribbons, which is to just sit and stare, an ersatz Margaret Mead, agitated about the narratives corporations are feeding the girls of today and our complicity in it, our raising the spoons to their mouths. Honestly, I am so grateful to have grown up in the much more gender-neutral 1970s, when we all wore GrrAnimals and the word princess was used as an insult, not something one aspired to become one day. We were too busy inventing things, creating stories, getting dirty. You cannot climb an oak tree in pink, plastic slippers, that much I know.
Another thing I know is that I am deeply grateful to have a child who is besotted with dinosaurs
and has only expressed deep apprehension about the purple corporate one. He creates elaborate stories about coelophysises and postasuchuses and bambiraptors without any interference and I'd like to keep it that way as long as possible. I am not a puritan but I can't really see any true benefits to giving corporations access to my child's imagination. There may very well come a day when he resents that he didn't spend more of his childhood with Spongebob, but for now, I'll keep my kid logo-free and independent in thought and spirit. He can go to therapy later.
Shalom, everyone.
I woke up like a shot this morning at 6:30 because my son had his cousin's birthday party in a distant suburb (the moral here, one that I already knew, is that the distant suburbs are Satan's Playgrounds, clearly) at the suitably ungodly hour of 10:30 and it's too painful to relive the chain of events that finally conspired to transport us there, but I will say that it involved an ill-fated, haphazard taxi ride part of the way to Union Station and another ride an hour later to said distant suburb that cost $90.00. Right after paying $175 for a tow. Oh and purchasing three tickets for a bombastic animatronic dinosaur show for another $175 because we were feeling flush at that brief moment before everything started collapsing around us. This damn show better help my son become the best paid paleontologist in the world, that's all I have to say. In the meantime, there are always lemonade stands and random, idle conversations about the Paleozoic era.
So, bringing us all back to the title, my sweet little niece turned four today so, almost inevitably, she has cotton candy-scented, bubble gum pink blood coursing in her veins and Cinderella on the brain. Disney has received a full access pass to this girl and her imagination, and it shows. She talks non-stop about princesses and castles, glitter sparkling and falling around her, like a pixilated little woodland nymph. Today, she received Barbie movies, Beauty and The Beast dress up stuff, Dora the Explorer pajamas, books featuring Cinderella. I think that our gift, a child's picnic basket and supplies, was the only non-pink, non-corporate-be-logo'ed item purchased for my niece this year. (Not that we're perfect by any stretch: this was the same gift we'd gotten her last year but mistakenly repurchased. Exchanging that will be another errand to remember.) During the gift opening, all I could do is all I usually do during the frenzy of shredded wrapping paper and discarded ribbons, which is to just sit and stare, an ersatz Margaret Mead, agitated about the narratives corporations are feeding the girls of today and our complicity in it, our raising the spoons to their mouths. Honestly, I am so grateful to have grown up in the much more gender-neutral 1970s, when we all wore GrrAnimals and the word princess was used as an insult, not something one aspired to become one day. We were too busy inventing things, creating stories, getting dirty. You cannot climb an oak tree in pink, plastic slippers, that much I know.
Another thing I know is that I am deeply grateful to have a child who is besotted with dinosaurs
and has only expressed deep apprehension about the purple corporate one. He creates elaborate stories about coelophysises and postasuchuses and bambiraptors without any interference and I'd like to keep it that way as long as possible. I am not a puritan but I can't really see any true benefits to giving corporations access to my child's imagination. There may very well come a day when he resents that he didn't spend more of his childhood with Spongebob, but for now, I'll keep my kid logo-free and independent in thought and spirit. He can go to therapy later.
Shalom, everyone.
Thursday, August 7, 2008
All About My Grandmother (and food and love and whatever else pops into my head)...
Today, I was at Kaufman's Deli with a friend of mine and our children when somehow the subject of kasha (buckwheat groats) came up. Oh, I know: my friend was ordering a kasha knish and I wondered aloud if she had ever heard of a dish my grandmother used to call 'Seashells and Kasha', my friend having grown up in a Polish home. She had not. I related to the best of my memory what was in it and how it was made (toasted kasha - which my family always called kashi, like the organic cereal - sauteed onion, an egg beaten into it and those little seashell-shaped pasta shells) and I asked the grandmotherly-like person who was checking my friend out at the counter if she had ever heard of it. She hadn't, but likely would have if I had called it by it's common name, kasha varnishkes. My friend remarked that she would have loved to have met my grandmother, and, boy, would she have adored her. It doesn't take much fo me to wax rhapsodic about my grandmother and for some reason, she's been on my mind more than usual lately. To me, she was truly perfect in every way, except that she was not with me for life.
My grandmother was the youngest of six, the daughter of Jews fleeing the pogroms in Russia. Her father was a trunk maker and her mother was a wonderful seamstress according to her daughter, creating beautiful lampshades. As I said, she was the youngest and the only one born in this country, both of which, I think, helped to infuse her with a lifelong spirit of optimism and vitality. If there was one person I admired growing up, it was my grandmother. I was equally devoted to my grandfather, her husband, but how I felt about him was different. He was quiet and mild and content by comparison, always a sweet smile on his face (that is until dementia took hold when I was fourteen); my grandmother, in contrast, always had a funny story, was a dynamo, a flirt with her neighborhood butcher, lit up from within with a contagious lust for life. I have come to understand in retrospect how her indomitable spirit doused my mother's, through no fault of her own. I don't think that my grandmother, who was so natural at winning people over, ever really understood her middle child's quiet resentment. My mother certainly loved my grandmother, but it was complicated. I think that my grandmother was a constant reminder to my mother of what she didn't have, namely, social ease and, far more significantly, a happy, stable marriage. My mother aligned herself more with my grandfather, with whom she enjoyed an uncomplicated, easy commeraderie.
Anyway, my grandmother. I think that she probably taught me more (of the sort of stuff I want to retain, that is) than anyone. She was a feminist without the word, through her confident, unapologetic nature and she had no shame about her voluptuous figure. She treated everyone she was speaking with as the most important person in the room, that is unless that person said something offensive, at which time she would politely remove herself from the conversation. She was exceedingly warm and friendly but also the tough daughter of immigrants: I was by her side when she was almost mugged near Sheridan Road, and she fought her would-be purse snatcher with two furiously protective fists until he ran away. (It was the first and only time I ever heard her say a curse word, which was more shocking to me than that whole potential mugging thing.) She loved to cook, sew, make preserves, all the stuff that the new generation of DIY enthusiasts have embraced and her own daughters rejected as too retro, too "Old World." I think that my love of cooking and my new enthusiasm for pickling and canning stems in some small part from a desire to keep her alive through me, even if her physical body has left. Every time I hang clothes to dry on my laundry line or make jam on my stove in the punishing heat of the summer, it's a way of communing with and connecting with my grandmother again.
I have a photo of my grandmother sitting at her dining room table, her sweet look-alike sister Mary by her side, both with huge smiles on their faces. I wonder who took the photo. Anyway, I look over this photo nearly every time I cook dinner for my own family and it fills me with warmth. [As I said, I am also someone who loves to cook and I long ago rejected (not that I ever accepted it) the notion that cooking for yourself and others is un-feminist somehow.] Her food, though I loved it as a child, is not the kind of food I would eat today. Partly through her example yet again, I have a love of animals and so I am vegan. Food is very deep, though, and it creates lifelong habits and cravings within us; it also helps us to connect with our heritage, our ancestors. To this day, I can remember the smell of the hot oil in her kitchen, cooking the potato pancakes (fluffy on the inside, crispy on the outside) and I can see the little cells of fat floating on the surface of her chicken soup. Clearly, this created an imprint.
When I became a vegetarian at fifteen part of what hurt was my grandmother feeling like I was rejecting her when I would no longer eat the brisket. It was something I had to do, though my grandmother loved to remind me how much I used to love meat. I just couldn't do it anymore, though, and I think that she finally understood it was about me being honest about what my spirit needed. About a dozen years later, I became vegan, thus excising some of the last connections to her food, which was so much a part of her. To me, though, my convictions were a higher calling. I would keep her spirit alive in different ways. I was content to leave it at that.
Not too long ago, though, I got a cookbook by a Brooklyn-based, proudly Jewish chef named Isa Chandra Moskowitz (and co-author Terry Hope Romero) of much acclaim called Vegan With a Vengeance. In its pages are vegan renditions of kugel, knishes, and that beloved Jewish powerhouse, matzoh ball soup. My heart lifted when I saw this recipe: it had been communicated to me that vegan matzoh balls were an quixotic fantasy, that they couldn't be achieved without the leavening action of eggs. Okay, then, I would just content myself with memories of her matzoh balls. Light, fluffy but dense, my grandmothers matzoh balls came to personify her to me in some strange way: they were just the right combination of yielding and strong, that perfect union. My other grandmother (a.k.a, my Mean Grandmother) made matzoh balls too, but they were like her to me: tough, flavorless, hard little balls of anger. When I saw the recipe in Vegan With a Vengeance, my heart lifted that I might be able to experience this little memory of my grandmother again.
It is a painstaking recipe, obviously written by someone who also wanted to create the perfect vegan matzoh ball (which, by the way, is brought into existence with the distinctly non-Jewish addition of silken tofu, but the Jews love Chinese food, right?, and I am not a purist) and worked really hard to achieve it. There are many steps and it takes quite a bit of time, but the recipe does create a more than acceptable vegan facsimile of the classic matzoh ball. The first time I took a bite, it was like Proust's madeleine to me, something that sent me instantly back through the years to my grandmother's cheerful, busy kitchen, sitting at her table with one foot hooked between the other, a spoon in hand, and, most important, my grandmother sitting across from me with her generous smile, easy laugh and impossibly soft, powdered skin. I am so grateful to these vegan chefs for giving me more immediate access to my memories again. The matzoh balls are not quite as perfect as my grandmother's - nothing could be - but they are all I need for them to be.
Ah. I could talk about my grandmother for days on end.
Shalom, everyone.
My grandmother was the youngest of six, the daughter of Jews fleeing the pogroms in Russia. Her father was a trunk maker and her mother was a wonderful seamstress according to her daughter, creating beautiful lampshades. As I said, she was the youngest and the only one born in this country, both of which, I think, helped to infuse her with a lifelong spirit of optimism and vitality. If there was one person I admired growing up, it was my grandmother. I was equally devoted to my grandfather, her husband, but how I felt about him was different. He was quiet and mild and content by comparison, always a sweet smile on his face (that is until dementia took hold when I was fourteen); my grandmother, in contrast, always had a funny story, was a dynamo, a flirt with her neighborhood butcher, lit up from within with a contagious lust for life. I have come to understand in retrospect how her indomitable spirit doused my mother's, through no fault of her own. I don't think that my grandmother, who was so natural at winning people over, ever really understood her middle child's quiet resentment. My mother certainly loved my grandmother, but it was complicated. I think that my grandmother was a constant reminder to my mother of what she didn't have, namely, social ease and, far more significantly, a happy, stable marriage. My mother aligned herself more with my grandfather, with whom she enjoyed an uncomplicated, easy commeraderie.
Anyway, my grandmother. I think that she probably taught me more (of the sort of stuff I want to retain, that is) than anyone. She was a feminist without the word, through her confident, unapologetic nature and she had no shame about her voluptuous figure. She treated everyone she was speaking with as the most important person in the room, that is unless that person said something offensive, at which time she would politely remove herself from the conversation. She was exceedingly warm and friendly but also the tough daughter of immigrants: I was by her side when she was almost mugged near Sheridan Road, and she fought her would-be purse snatcher with two furiously protective fists until he ran away. (It was the first and only time I ever heard her say a curse word, which was more shocking to me than that whole potential mugging thing.) She loved to cook, sew, make preserves, all the stuff that the new generation of DIY enthusiasts have embraced and her own daughters rejected as too retro, too "Old World." I think that my love of cooking and my new enthusiasm for pickling and canning stems in some small part from a desire to keep her alive through me, even if her physical body has left. Every time I hang clothes to dry on my laundry line or make jam on my stove in the punishing heat of the summer, it's a way of communing with and connecting with my grandmother again.
I have a photo of my grandmother sitting at her dining room table, her sweet look-alike sister Mary by her side, both with huge smiles on their faces. I wonder who took the photo. Anyway, I look over this photo nearly every time I cook dinner for my own family and it fills me with warmth. [As I said, I am also someone who loves to cook and I long ago rejected (not that I ever accepted it) the notion that cooking for yourself and others is un-feminist somehow.] Her food, though I loved it as a child, is not the kind of food I would eat today. Partly through her example yet again, I have a love of animals and so I am vegan. Food is very deep, though, and it creates lifelong habits and cravings within us; it also helps us to connect with our heritage, our ancestors. To this day, I can remember the smell of the hot oil in her kitchen, cooking the potato pancakes (fluffy on the inside, crispy on the outside) and I can see the little cells of fat floating on the surface of her chicken soup. Clearly, this created an imprint.
When I became a vegetarian at fifteen part of what hurt was my grandmother feeling like I was rejecting her when I would no longer eat the brisket. It was something I had to do, though my grandmother loved to remind me how much I used to love meat. I just couldn't do it anymore, though, and I think that she finally understood it was about me being honest about what my spirit needed. About a dozen years later, I became vegan, thus excising some of the last connections to her food, which was so much a part of her. To me, though, my convictions were a higher calling. I would keep her spirit alive in different ways. I was content to leave it at that.
Not too long ago, though, I got a cookbook by a Brooklyn-based, proudly Jewish chef named Isa Chandra Moskowitz (and co-author Terry Hope Romero) of much acclaim called Vegan With a Vengeance. In its pages are vegan renditions of kugel, knishes, and that beloved Jewish powerhouse, matzoh ball soup. My heart lifted when I saw this recipe: it had been communicated to me that vegan matzoh balls were an quixotic fantasy, that they couldn't be achieved without the leavening action of eggs. Okay, then, I would just content myself with memories of her matzoh balls. Light, fluffy but dense, my grandmothers matzoh balls came to personify her to me in some strange way: they were just the right combination of yielding and strong, that perfect union. My other grandmother (a.k.a, my Mean Grandmother) made matzoh balls too, but they were like her to me: tough, flavorless, hard little balls of anger. When I saw the recipe in Vegan With a Vengeance, my heart lifted that I might be able to experience this little memory of my grandmother again.
It is a painstaking recipe, obviously written by someone who also wanted to create the perfect vegan matzoh ball (which, by the way, is brought into existence with the distinctly non-Jewish addition of silken tofu, but the Jews love Chinese food, right?, and I am not a purist) and worked really hard to achieve it. There are many steps and it takes quite a bit of time, but the recipe does create a more than acceptable vegan facsimile of the classic matzoh ball. The first time I took a bite, it was like Proust's madeleine to me, something that sent me instantly back through the years to my grandmother's cheerful, busy kitchen, sitting at her table with one foot hooked between the other, a spoon in hand, and, most important, my grandmother sitting across from me with her generous smile, easy laugh and impossibly soft, powdered skin. I am so grateful to these vegan chefs for giving me more immediate access to my memories again. The matzoh balls are not quite as perfect as my grandmother's - nothing could be - but they are all I need for them to be.
Ah. I could talk about my grandmother for days on end.
Shalom, everyone.
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
My produce drawer scares me...
It feels like an incredibly privileged thing to complain about (because it is), but my produce drawers are full-to-bursting with assorted items: sweet potatoes, apricots, beets, pickling cucumbers, regular cucumbers, jalapenos, a big ol' bowling ball of a red cabbage. It's always this way this time of year for us when we get a CSA box, which we hadn't for three years so I'm out of practice, in addition to our town's fantastic farmer's market. I've got big plans for it all - pickles, preserves, giardenera - except for the cabbage. I fear that another one is ready to come rolling down the pike at me come Saturday, so I had better make with the choppy-choppy. Myra Kornfeld's excellent Voluptuous Vegan has a recipe for German red cabbage with beer and caraway seeds and that is what I am leaning toward now. I am getting a little nervous about when tomato season officially hits here but I am going to be prepared.
Shalom, everyone.
Shalom, everyone.
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